More Counterfeit Interviews

Yesterday, I posted a followup to my Talk of the Town story in this week’s issue about the literary hoaxes perpetrated by Tommaso Debenedetti, a freelance journalist based in Rome who fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham. I had uncovered a third fabrication—a fake interview with Gore Vidal.

Last night, in the online archives of Il Piccolo, a local paper published in Trieste where the Vidal Q. & A. first appeared, I found more than twenty additional interviews under Debenedetti’s byline purporting to be conversations by telephone or in person with some of the most eminent figures in world literature. The earliest was from 2006; the most recent was published last month. More than half of his subjects were Nobel laureates.

I began contacting these writers and their representatives. As of this afternoon:

E. L. Doctorow told me that the language and, in particular, the imagery, attributed to him are “impossible.”

Philip Roth was amused to hear that Debenedetti had published a second interview with him, from 2009.

Gunter Grass “has a good memory,” his German editor, Helmut Frielinghaus, told me by e-mail, yet he cannot recall Debenedetti. And Frielinghaus reads all of Grass’s interviews but never saw this one before.

Nadine Gordimer, according to her literary agent, could not recognize her own voice.

The wife of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio told me that it was “extremely improbable” that her husband had ever spoken with Debenedetti or expressed the opinions attributed to him. (Le Clézio was alleged to have deplored the proposed French ban on the burqa in public buildings.) “It sounds crazy,” she said.

A publicist for Herta Müller said that the reclusive Romanian-born writer almost never speaks to journalists, and certainly did not give an interview to Debenedetti.

In the meantime, I reached the managing editor of Il Piccolo, Alessandro Mazzena Lona, on his cell phone. Mazzena Lona told me that he had learned about the fabrications only half an hour before my call, from one of his colleagues, with whom I had just spoken.

Mazzena Lona said he met Tommaso Debenedetti several years ago. Debenedetti, he explained, is the son of the Italian writer Antonio Debenedetti and the grandson of Giacomo Debenedetti, whom Mazzena Lona described as “our greatest literary critic of the twentieth century.” Mazzena Lona had never seen documentation for any of the quotations or paraphrases published in Il Piccolo, but he had never asked for any, since he saw no reason to doubt that a Debenedetti would have such connections in the literary world: “It is a very serious, great family,” Mazzena Lona said, “with deep roots, I believe, in the Jewish community of Rome.” The editor also pointed out, however, that Tommaso Debenedetti was a freelancer who lived far from Trieste.

“It is appalling,” Mazzena Lona reflected, “that someone would use such an illustrious name to mask a hoax.”

How could one explain Debenedetti’s motives? “Not money, certainly. We don’t pay much. I would probably say megalomania.”

Through Il Piccolo, I finally reached Debenedetti in Rome, on his cell phone. We spoke in Italian—his spoken English, he explained, is not very good, although, he added, “I understand everything, and I can speak well enough to pose questions.”

Debenedetti said he was completely “shocked and saddened” that all these writers would have denied the veracity of his reporting. When I asked him about the interviews with Roth and Grisham, he flatly denied having invented them, and told me that Roth and Grisham were lying for “political” reasons—because their views on Obama would make them unpopular with left-leaning intellectuals. Roth, he added, might have decided that it was impolitic to express hostility toward Obama because it might spoil his chances for the Nobel.

I then read the list of other writers who had denied or questioned his conversations with them. In every case, Debenedetti asserted that he had invented nothing. When I asked if he could produce any recordings or notes from his interviews, he laughed and, admitting that it sounded like a “tired” excuse, told me that he had lost the tapes in some cases, and in others had “thrown them away.”

Debenedetti did, however, want me to tell my readers that he had been paid almost nothing—about twenty euros—for his articles in Il Piccolo. I think one can believe him when he insists that he wasn’t driven by financial considerations.

Finally, I asked Debenedetti about his father. He told me that they were estranged, and had been for several years. “We don’t have a relationship,” he said.

Tommaso’s father, Antonio Debenedetti, who contributes frequently to Corriere della Sera, Italy’s newspaper of record, is now seventy-three, and an Italian news item recently reported—erroneously—that he had died. To which Antonio had this to say:

It doesn’t happen every day that one denies one’s own death. I’m bothered by the ease with which the media will publish any story without verifying it.

UPDATE (April 5, 5:25 P.M.): On Friday morning, I received an e-mail from Jemia Le Clézio, the wife of Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French Nobel Laureate. Debenedetti’s interview, she wrote, is “completely false.” Her husband “has never heard of that man, never gave his thoughts about any political topic concerning Islam in general or in France to anyone.” I also received an e-mail from Paola Novarese, of Einaudi, which publishes both A. B. Yehoshua and J. M. Coetzee. Yehoshua was in Italy to receive a literary prize at the end of June, 2006, but the journalist who covered that event for Il Piccolo was not Tommaso Debenedetti, and the awards ceremony took place a day after the byline on Debenedetti’s “interview.” No contact with Debenedetti and Yehoshua, or Debenedetti and Coetzee, was ever organized by Einaudi, she said, regretting that she could not be more definitive. And Coeztee’s literary agent, Peter Lampack, has e-mailed to say that while Coetzee was in Rome during the summer of 2004, he has “no specific recollection of meeting with or speaking to Mr. Debenedetti or participating in an interview with him. Furthermore, a search of John’s email records indicate no reference to or about Mr. Debenedetti. While John will not definitively assert he may not have met Mr. Debenedetti as one of many other people he casually met during his stay, he will say the words Mr. Debenedetti quotes John as saying are not John’s words. Of this John is certain.”

UPDATE (April 6, 10:24 A.M.): Last night, I received the following e-mail from Sergio Letria, of the José Saramago Foundation, in Lisbon: “The interview allegedly given by José Saramago to Tommaso Debenedetti is, for sure, another hoax.” Letria went on to enumerate a number of “foolish things” that the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner could never have said to the Italian freelancer, including pronouncements about travel, abstention from voting, the character of Italy, Fernando Pessoa’s “novels” (Pessoa did not write novels), and aging. “The text does also not reflect Saramago’s political thinking,” he concluded. If there are some shreds of truth to the opinions expressed, “they must have been gathered from other interviews, and the final result confirms what other writers have already said”: that Debenedetti “has invented interviews that never took place” with the help of secondary sources and his own imagination.